I nod when the doctor hands me papers, I thank him when he says something I don’t catch.
I let Alia herd me out, her voice filling every silence with gasps and exclamations. She’s still reeling, rattling off how insane this is, how unexpected, how I need to figure out what I want to do.
She keeps saying the wordoptions, like it’s supposed to ground me, but it just makes the ground tilt further under my feet.
I can’t give her anything. My responses are no more than small, flat sounds, a grunt here, a hum there, while my mind roars with one thought.I have to tell him.
By the time we pull up outside my building, I’ve scraped together just enough strength to speak.
“Don’t bother coming up,” I murmur, already reaching for the door handle. “I just… need some space.”
Alia hesitates, worry written all over her face. But eventually, she nods, squeezing my arm once before I slip out and shut the door behind me.
My legs are unsteady on the climb upstairs as if I’m learning to walk for the first time again. The second I push my door shut, I’m already digging into my bag, nearly dropping my phone as I pull it free. My fingers are trembling so badly I can barely scroll, searching, searching until I land on the name I swore I’d delete weeks ago but couldn’t.
Sergei.
The only thread I still have left connecting me to Maksim.
My thumb hovers over the contact, hesitating for a single heartbeat before pressing down. He answers on the third ring.
“Sergei Sorokin.” His voice is exactly as I remember.
My own comes out a rasp, shaking and unfamiliar in my throat. “Sergei? Um, it’s Ivy… Ivy Bennett. I need to talk to Maksim Antonov. I was hoping you had his number so I could give him a call. It’s urgent.”
There’s a pause.
It stretches. Long enough that my knees threaten to buckle. Long enough that dread claws at me, whispering that he’s just deciding whether he’ll pass me along, weighing whether I deserve to reach Maksim at all or not after what happened.
But when Sergei speaks, the weight of his words is a guillotine.
“Maksim Antonov is dead, Miss Bennett.”
The air leaves my lungs all at once like I’ve been punched in the sternum. “W–What?”
“He’s gone.” The words are final, clipped.
But before I can beg for an explanation, before I can ask how, before I can tell him about the baby swelling quietly inside me, the line clicks dead.
The silence on the other end is absolute.
I stare at the phone in my hand, the screen gone dark, my reflection staring back at me with wide, horrified eyes. My chest feels tight, my heart an echo chamber of disbelief and pure, unadulterated pain.
Dead.
Maksim Antonov is dead and I’m carrying the last remaining piece of him.
25
IVY
7Years Later…
If someone had toldme eight years ago that I’d be living in a small, quiet town three states away from where I’d grown up, sharing a house with my estranged family and raising my six-year-old son, I would’ve laughed in their face.
Or maybe cried.
Back then, the idea of being in the same room as my mother, let alone under the same roof, for more than a few minutes was impossible. Her voice grated on me, every word sharp with judgment, every silence just as condemning. My stepfather had lingered just out of view, always wanting to keep the peace but never having the tools to do so. And Lettie, my half-sister, she and I circled each other like strangers forcibly bound together by shared blood, speaking in clipped exchanges whenever we were forced into the same room.
